Car companies are trying to make a lot of new technology happen all at once. Not all of it is going to stick.
When we talk to car buyers, we hear they want affordability, electric range and easy-to-use tech features. That’s why I doubt many consumers will make their next car purchase based on which model has built-in ChatGPT, though Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz sure hope I’m wrong. Nobody seems particularly thrilled about the advent of subscription-based features—except for car companies themselves. Screens in cars are becoming increasingly enormous even as people revolt about the lack of easy-to-use physical controls. So what new features really feel like game-changers truly worth springing for?
Get Fully Charged
What to know about GM's Super Cruise
Many automakers now sell advanced driver-assistance tech that take on the basic tasks of highway driving—as long as a human remains attentive. Super Cruise takes things a step further by letting you remove your hands from the steering wheel on a growing amount of approved highways.
Here’s an advancement that feels like it has real utility and staying power: Super Cruise. I used General Motors’ hands-free driving system extensively when I tested the Cadillac Lyriq recently, and I found it to be both competent and extremely helpful. The automated driving feature was so useful, in fact, that returning to the drudgery of manually driving my 2010 Subaru felt genuinely deflating. If you think that sounds like a ridiculous, first-world complaint, you’re right on the money. But you also clearly haven’t tried Super Cruise before.
(Full disclosure: GM lent me a Cadillac Lyriq for a week. It arrived fully charged.)
Super Cruise is a “hands-off, eyes-on” system, meaning it can handle the bulk of steering, accelerating, lane-changing and stopping on a growing list of mapped highways without the driver having to touch the wheel. Provided, of course, that their eyes are on the road—attentiveness that’s monitored by the car’s internal infrared cameras.
Today, the average car on U.S. roads is 12.5 years old, so the typical driver has little clue how far this kind of automated driving technology has come. But I think soon enough—and with some fine-tuning—Super Cruise and systems like it will be as commonplace and in demand as cruise control and power mirrors.
Why? Unlike AI integration or the ability to play Angry Birds on your infotainment screen, it solves a real problem people have, which is that driving on the highway for extended periods sucks. It leaves most people cranky and fatigued. Adding Super Cruise into the mix makes the most tedious parts of driving a lot more enjoyable and a whole lot less taxing. It isn’t the only system that can do this, but it’s widely regarded as one of the best.
Let’s use my recent four-hour round-trip to a state park as an example. On the local roads from my home to the highway and from the highway to my final destination, I drove the Lyriq manually, something I don’t mind doing in the slightest. But Super Cruise handled the long, monotonous and traffic-choked 50-mile section in the middle.
When I got to the highway, I switched on cruise control, then clicked the Super Cruise button on the steering wheel. A light strip at the top of the wheel illuminated in green, signaling that Super Cruise was active. From that point onward, the Cadillac admirably handled most of the driving as I supervised.
Super Cruise confidently kept the Lyriq centered in its lane while smoothly navigating bends in the road. It maintained whatever speed I set it to, slowing down and speeding up as traffic allowed. Bouts of bumper-to-bumper traffic came and went without the typical groans and stress that accompany it. Since I had the automatic lane change feature switched on, the Lyriq maneuvered around slower cars if it sensed an opening to the left. And as all of this was happening, I was free to let go of the steering wheel and watch it do its thing. However, I usually kept my hands at the ready and I recommend you do the same.
That’s because, as impressive as Super Cruise is, it’s not even close to a fully autonomous system. That doesn’t exist yet on the consumer market; there are no truly “self-driving cars” available right now. Rather, Super Cruise, Tesla Autopilot, Ford Blue Cruise and most rival features out there are what’s known in industry lingo as Level 2 advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).
At their core, they combine lane-centering and radar-based cruise control features to steer, accelerate and brake on the highway—but only under driver supervision. Most use a combination of cameras and sensors to “see” lane lines and other cars. Super Cruise also uses highly detailed, 3D maps of the roads it operates on. Tesla, meanwhile, is betting its future on automated driving systems that use just cameras and AI—not HD maps and other sensors.
No matter how convincingly “smart” these features are, they may make mistakes or require drivers to take over at a moment’s notice. The one outlier is Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, which allows drivers to look away from the road in traffic jams, so long as they take over within 10 seconds if asked; that technically makes it a Level 3 ADAS setup, although it is currently limited only to major freeways in California and parts of Nevada. Some companies, like GM, Ford and BMW, invite drivers to take their hands off the wheel under certain circumstances. Other manufacturers offer similar systems that are hands-on.
Sure enough, in my experience Super Cruise worked for long stretches without issue. But it wasn’t perfect. A few times, it urgently requested I take control when lanes merged together. A couple of times, it disengaged for no discernable reason. Since I was paying attention, none of it was a big deal, but it can be startling. I also noticed some unsettling behaviors that should probably be ironed out.
With automatic lane changing switched on, the Lyriq would often merge left and then immediately bounce back to its original lane. That got so annoying that I switched off the feature entirely. Fortunately, Super Cruise will also change lanes if you tap the turn signal stalk.
When another car would start edging into my lane, the Lyriq often took way too long to adjust its speed. This was a common scenario: The car ahead would start speeding up, opening up a gap. The Lyriq would register that and start accelerating too, without noticing that a car to the right had already started moving into the gap. Only once the merging car was maybe halfway or more into the Lyriq’s lane would it hit the brakes, which was always a little freaky.
Similarly, Super Cruise took some curves too fast for comfort. And in situations where a human would see traffic at a standstill far ahead and start slowing down well in advance, Super Cruise tended to keep barreling onward at its set speed. It always slowed down eventually, but later than a person would. Another InsideEVs editor has noticed some uneasiness and disengagements around construction sites as well, but that may be for the best for now.
Even with the hiccups, Super Cruise is a home run for relieving driver fatigue and improving comfort. You don’t realize how much mental energy you expend while driving until you hand over the grunt work to a machine. And once you try something like Super Cruise on a long drive, it’s hard to imagine life without it. Truth be told, I’m undecided on whether hands-free is better than hands-on. Both kinds of systems offer similar benefits, but hands-free strikes me as slightly more enjoyable to use.
These features are becoming a lot more commonplace, and they’re shifting downmarket as the flashiest extras tend to over time. Tesla pioneered adaptive cruise control and lane-centering about a decade ago in Autopilot.
Now Autopilot-like offerings abound—and they sometimes beat Tesla’s feature in independent rankings. GM launched Super Cruise in 2017 on one Cadillac. Now it says it’s bringing the feature to 22 models by the end of this year. Today Super Cruise works on 480,000 miles of highways in the U.S. and Canada, GM says, and the company plans to expand that to 750,000 miles by the end of 2025.
It’ll be a long time before everybody in America is Super Cruising, Autopiloting or Blue Cruising down the highway. But I don’t think that kind of future is too hard to imagine. And it’s a good thing that this is a slow burn, because there’s a lot more consumer education to be done around what these features can actually do and the potential for distracted driving.
I can’t speak for the rest of America, but when I buy my next new car, adaptive cruise and lane-centering won’t just be at the top of my wishlist. They’ll be must-haves.
Contact the author: tim.levin@insideevs.com
